ABSTRACT
The aim of this book is to develop an approach by which the mechanisms of joke comprehension can be described relatively precisely. This has been done in a way that both takes account of some current ideas about knowledge representation and text understanding and also incorporates several ideas about humour that have often been presented as competing alternatives. The goal is to develop a collection of related concepts that are suitable for giving a theoretically sound and precisely specified description of what goes on as someone understands a textual joke. This does not claim to be a full theory of jokes or of humour more generally. Instead, it provides some steps towards the construction of such theories, by consolidating various existing ideas about joke mechanisms into an overall framework. The work is located within the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science, and hence draws on ideas from a number of areas, particularly psychology, linguistics, philosophy and artificial intelligence.
